“It is M. Deneulin,” said Honorine, returning.
Behind her, Deneulin, a cousin of M. Grégoire’s, appeared without ceremony; with his loud voice, his quick gestures, he had the appearance of an old cavalry officer. Although over fifty, his short hair and thick moustache were as black as ink.
“Yes! It is I. Good day! Don’t disturb yourselves.”
He had sat down amid the family’s exclamations. They turned back at last to their chocolate.
“Have you anything to tell me?” asked M. Grégoire.
“No! nothing at all,” Deneulin hastened to reply. “I came out on horseback to rub off the rust a bit, and as I passed your door I thought I would just look in.”
Cécile questioned him about Jeanne and Lucie, his daughters. They were perfectly well, the first was always at her painting, while the other, the elder, was training her voice at the piano from morning till night. And there was a slight quiver in his voice, a disquiet which he concealed beneath bursts of gaiety.
M. Grégoire began again:
“And everything goes well at the pit?”
“Well, I am upset over this dirty crisis. Ah! we are paying for the prosperous years! They have built too many workshops, put down too many railways, invested too much capital with a view to a large return, and today the money is asleep. They can’t get any more to make the whole thing work. Luckily things are not desperate; I shall get out of it somehow.”
Like his cousin he had inherited a denier in the Montsou mines. But being an enterprising engineer, tormented by the desire for a royal fortune, he had hastened to sell out when the denier had reached a million. For some months he had been maturing a scheme. His wife possessed, through an uncle, the little concession of Vandame, where only two pits were open—Jean-Bart and Gaston-Marie—in an abandoned state, and with such defective material that the output hardly covered the cost. Now he was meditating the repair of Jean-Bart, the renewal of the engine, and the enlargement of the shaft so as to facilitate the descent, keeping Gaston-Marie only for exhaustion purposes. They ought to be able to shovel up gold there, he said. The idea was sound. Only the million had been spent over it, and this damnable industrial crisis broke out at the moment when large profits would have shown that he was right. Besides, he was a bad manager, with a rough kindness towards his workmen, and since his wife’s death he allowed himself to be pillaged, and also gave the rein to his daughters, the elder of whom talked of going on the stage, while the younger had already had three landscapes refused at the Salon, both of them joyous amid the downfall, and exhibiting in poverty their capacity for good household management.
“You see, Léon,” he went on, in a hesitating voice, “you were wrong not to sell out at the same time as I did; now everything is going down. You run risk, and if you had confided your money to me you would have seen what we should have done at Vandame in our mine!”
M. Grégoire finished his chocolate without haste. He replied peacefully:
“Never! You know that I don’t want to speculate. I live quietly, and it would be too foolish to worry my head over business affairs. And as for Montsou, it may continue to go down, we shall always get our living out of it. It doesn’t do to be so diabolically greedy! Then, listen, it is you who will bite your fingers one day, for Montsou will rise again and Cécile’s grandchildren will still get their white bread out of it.”
Deneulin listened with a constrained smile.
“Then,” he murmured, “if I were to ask you to put a hundred thousand francs in my affair you would refuse?”
But seeing the Grégoires’ disturbed faces he regretted having gone so far; he put off his idea of a loan, reserving it until the case was desperate.
“Oh! I have not got to that! it is a joke. Good heavens! Perhaps you are right; the money that other people earn for you is the best to fatten on.”
They changed the conversation. Cécile spoke again of her cousins, whose tastes interested, while at the same time they shocked her. Madame Grégoire promised to take her daughter to see those dear little ones on the first fine day. M. Grégoire, however, with a distracted air, did not follow the conversation. He added aloud:
“If I were in your place I wouldn’t persist any more; I would treat with Montsou. They want it, and you will get your money back.”
He alluded to an old hatred which existed between the concession of Montsou and that of Vandame. In spite of the latter’s slight importance, its powerful neighbour was enraged at seeing, enclosed within its own sixty-seven communes, this square league which did not belong to it, and after having vainly tried to kill it had plotted to buy it at a low price when in a failing condition. The war continued without truce. Each party stopped its galleries at two hundred metres from the other; it was a duel to the last drop of blood, although the managers and engineers maintained polite relations with each other.
Deneulin’s eyes had flamed up.
“Never!” he cried, in his turn. “Montsou shall never have Vandame as long as I am alive. I dined on Thursday at Hennebeau’s, and I saw him fluttering around me. Last autumn, when the big men came to the administration building, they made me all sorts of advances. Yes, yes, I know them—those marquises, and dukes, and generals, and ministers! Brigands who would take away even your shirt at the corner of a wood.”
He could not cease. Besides, M. Grégoire did not defend the administration of Montsou—the six stewards established by the treaty of 1760, who governed the Company
